Category Archives: History

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COUNTRY LIFE MAGAZINE – SEPTEMBER 30, 2026 PREVIEW

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COUNTRY LIFE MAGAZINE: The latest issue features ‘Restoration Miracle’ – How a garden was transformed…

When the Englishman’s house was no longer his castle

Deborah Nicholls-Lee explores how the requisition of country houses played a crucial role in winning the Second World War

Look, listen, learn

Nature writer Mark Cocker delves into his new book to explain how we can open our eyes to the world around us

The last milkman standing?

Are doorstep dairy deliveries a thing of the past, asks Patrick Galbraith, as he joins one of the capital’s few remaining rounds

Spreads from Country Life September 30, 2026

The restoration of ‘England’s green and pleasant land’

Timothy Mowl admires the revival of one of the finest and earliest Pulhamite gardens at Highnam Court in Gloucestershire

The Versailles of the north

The Duchess of Northumberland tells Charles Quest-Ritson of her plans for the Alnwick Garden as it celebrates its 25th anniversary

Tony Iommi’s favourite painting

The Black Sabbath founder chooses a work depicting beauty, strength and grace

Country-house treasure

John Goodall raises a glass to the late-Victorian ‘Braxted Bar’ that dominates the entrance hall at Braxted Park in Essex

The genius of place

Classical and Gothic detailing are employed to dramatic effect at Home Farm in North Yorkshire, finds John Martin Robinson

Spreads from Country Life September 30, 2026

On the brink of extinction

In a last call for the telephone exchange, Ptolemy Dean ponders the future of the obsolete edifices

The legacy

Octavia Pollock hails the vision of John Bateman, whose dams and reservoirs still serve us today

There goes summer

John Lewis-Stempel prepares to get hands-on with his flock as thoughts turn to tupping time with the transition to autumn

The return of the native

The large tortoiseshell butterfly is back. Harry Pearson hails British species risen from the dead

Spreads from Country Life September 30, 2026

Luxury

Amie Elizabeth White showcases floral jewels and country classics, plus Rita Konig’s favourite things

Interiors

Amelia Thorpe picks companies that add a touch of craftsmanship to country-house renovations

Arts & antiques

Ahead of a new Pierre-Auguste Renoir exhibition at the National Gallery, Michael Prodger looks at how the French Impressionist is still dividing critical opinion

Spreads from Country Life September 30, 2026

Countryside mystery

Straying livestock could prove costly in the days of the village pound, as John Wright reveals

Travel

Rosie Paterson visits the Algarve in Portugal and finds a natural haven that is truly worth its salt

Ripe for the picking

From apples to pears and pomegranates, painters down the ages have used all manner of fruit as artistic symbols, as Michael Prodger discovers

Art, Arts & Literature, Exhibitions, History, Magazines, Museums

APOLLO MAGAZINE – OCTOBER 2026

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October 2026 issue

APOLLO MAGAZINE: The latest issue features ‘ROY LICHTENSTEIN’S EXPLOSIVE GENIUS’| France’s grandest interior designer | the birth of the London art scene | why dinosaurs rule at auction

Roy Lichtenstein’s explosive genius

The artist’s bold work arrived with a bang, but the American Pop artist was also responding to earlier revolutions

Does democracy have an architecture of its own?

Jan-Werner Müller’s new book explores the question of how we might design truly democratic spaces, but perhaps the answer lies in our own behaviour

What to see at Art Basel Paris

The vibrant modern and contemporary fair is showing no signs of slowing down

Charting the expanding market for historical maps

From early atlases of the Americas to the oldest surviving town plan of London, interest in important significant maps is spreading

Economics, Foreign Affairs, History, Magazines, Reviews, Technology

BEIJING REVIEW MAGAZINE – OCTOBER 1, 2026

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BEIJING REVIEW MAGAZINE: The latest issue features ‘THE LONG MARCH’ – Inside the journey that shaped China’s trajectory…

OUT OF THE ROBOT CLASSROOM: CHINA’S EMBODIED AI TAKES ON REAL-WORLD JOBS

Thirty robots made up the first class at a robot school in Hangzhou, east China’s Zhejiang Province. After more than two months of training, four have graduated and landed formal jobs. 

THE LONG MARCH REVISITED

When the idea of the new Long March experience was first presented to me, I was enthusiastic. From early June through late July, we would spend six weeks following part of the route of the original Long March (1934-36) in honor of the journey’s conclusion 90 years ago this October.

The Long March was one of the seminal historical events of the 20th century. It had a transformative impact on the history of modern China.

WHY EU-CHINA MUST TEAM UP ON AI GOVERNANCE

At the World Intelligence Expo 2026 in Tianjin, I emphasized in my speech the principle that should guide every conversation about artificial intelligence (AI) today, namely without transparent, responsible, and ethical governance frameworks, the transformative potential of AI would be undermined by fragmentation and mistrust. The world now stands at a crossroads. A unified global AI governance framework remains elusive, so the question is no longer whether the EU and China should cooperate, but where and how they can do so most effectively.

Economics, Essays, History, Intellicurean.com, Literature

THE COST OF NOTHING – AN INTELLICUREAN ESSAY

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Intellicurean Essays on Intellicurious

What nothing can cost: for thirty years Japan’s money was almost free to borrow, its young were told they had risen above wanting things, and the rest of the world quietly built on both. Now the tide is coming back in.

A tiny thatched hut with one lit window on a dark hillside, above a sea that has drawn far out, its bed covered in bronze coins leading to a distant glowing city
The hut, the coins and the city, painted for the essay. An invention, and disclosed as one there.

Why we’re pointing you there

A New York Times column this week warned that Japanese money, abroad for three decades, is starting to go home. Michael Cummins takes that market story and finds a second one underneath it. The same years that made yen the cheapest money on earth also produced a nickname for a whole generation: the satori sedai, the enlightened ones, young people said to want nothing. The essay is careful to keep the two apart. A central bank made the cheap money; a joke on an anonymous message board made the name. But the name was how the stillness got told, and the world priced it as if it would last forever.

What we liked most is how far back it reaches for its measure. It opens on an ice-pop company bowing on television to apologize for a ten-yen price rise, and it ends in a ten-foot hut built by a monk in 1212, who praised his reduced life and then, at the very end, doubted it. Between them come a young Natsume Sōseki translating that monk into English, a Texas hedge-fund manager ruined by being right too early, and one number about who owns Japan’s debt that explains three decades in a sentence. Both Japanese sources are translated fresh for the piece.

A lone figure in a dark suit bows deeply under a single spotlight, on a dark floor scattered with plain bronze coins
A bow over small change, painted for the essay.

Read the full essay at Intellicurean →

Essays & Reviews for the Intellectually Curious

Essays, History, Intellicurean.com, Literature, Philosophy

LAST MAN SMIRKING

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Intellicurean Essays on Intellicurious

For thirty years we have pictured Nietzsche’s last man as a creature of comfort, blinking contentedly at the end of history. Read the page again and he is doing something else entirely. He is smirking. What if the people who want the least are the proudest people of all?

An empty velvet armchair roped off beneath a skylight, exactly midway between a marble statue of a gladiator and a sleeping pig in a museum gallery
The chair in the midst, painted for the essay. An invention, and captioned as one there.

Why we’re pointing you there

Francis Fukuyama made the last man famous in 1992, and in a new memoir he says we now live in the last man’s world. Michael Cummins agrees about the world and argues that Fukuyama has had the man wrong from the start. Fukuyama imagined someone who had lost the old hunger to be thought better than others. Cummins goes back to Zarathustra and finds a crowd vain about its culture, and a passage in which the small people boast of sitting precisely halfway between the gladiator and the pig. The hunger never left. It learned to pass for modesty.

What we liked most is that the essay won’t let anyone off. It uses Fukuyama’s own pages to explain why a democracy drives ambition into hiding, borrows Kojève’s discovery of Japanese snobbery and turns it inside out, and then gives Nietzsche’s rival snobbery of the heights its due, along with Fukuyama’s warning about the bored crowds of August 1914. It ends at Niagara, with a French acrobat and a chair, and the best last line we have run this year.

Read the full essay at Intellicurean →

Essays & Reviews for the Intellectually Curious

Essays, History, Intellicurean.com

SHE READ TACITUS

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Intellicurean Essays

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She Read Tacitus

A young woman seen from behind, reading by candlelight at a winter window, while guardsmen with torches march through the snow below

In the winter after her son was taken from her, the grand duchess who would become Catherine the Great read the Annals of Tacitus and wrote later that it caused “a singular revolution in my brain.” Seven years later she took a throne. What she learned from Tacitus was not how to seize one. It was who writes the record afterward.

In the winter after her son was taken from her, a grand duchess of twenty-five read the Annals and wrote later that it caused “a singular revolution in my brain.” Seven years later she took a throne. What she learned from Tacitus was not how to seize one. It was who writes the record afterward.

Catherine managed three documents about the coup of 1762: a manifesto that said she was compelled, a second that said her husband died of colic, and a long letter to a lover in Warsaw that told him everything, hour by hour, and told him colic too. A fourth document was found in her cabinet thirty-four years later: a note from Alexei Orlov confessing a drunken accident at Ropsha, which clears her of ordering the death, which survives only in a copy made in a quarter of an hour by a courtier of her son’s, and which the archive, when asked directly, cannot find.

A carriage at a gallop on a dawn road along the sea, guardsmen closing round

The Peterhof road, six in the morning, 28 June 1762, as the essay imagines it. A generated image, not a record.

Why we’re pointing you there

Michael Cummins reads the four documents the way Tacitus taught Catherine to read everything: as records made by parties with reasons. Herzen in 1858, Bain in 1902, a Russian archivist who counted the letters in the folder and found two, and a confession that got drunker with each printing. One guess, graded, about why she wrote her own account first; two readings of the forgery, if it is one; and an ending in a drawer that held either the proof of her innocence or nothing at all.

The reader of Tacitus was read, at the end, by Tacitus’s method. The method cannot tell which.

Read the essay at Intellicurean →

Intellicurious points to the best of what we read and make. The full essay, with its sources and colophon, lives at intellicurean.com.

Essays, History, Intellicurean.com, Philosophy

ANOTHER MAN’S ELOQUENCE

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Intellicurean Essays

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Another Man’s Eloquence

In the autumn of 54 a boy emperor praised a dead man, and the crowd smiled at the wrong moment. The sentences were Seneca’s. What happens to a philosopher who spends eight years as someone else’s voice?

Seneca, seen from behind by lamplight, dictating to a single scribe

The dictation, AD 65, as the essay imagines it. A generated image, not a record.

Tacitus says the old men in the Forum noticed something new that day: Nero was the first ruler of Rome to need another man’s eloquence. Five years later the same man wrote the letter that explained a mother’s murder to the Senate, and the city blamed the ghost, not the emperor. Three years after that, the charge that ended his career was that he had claimed the credit. And in the first year he owned his own mouth, he wrote the most famous opening in Roman philosophy: set yourself free for your own sake.

Why we’re pointing you there

Michael Cummins follows the voice through four dates, 54, 59, 62 and 65, and finds one word doing the work: aliena, “another’s,” the word Tacitus used for Nero’s borrowed speech and the word Seneca used, in his own letters, for everything a man does not own. The essay makes one guess about what the throne cost him, grades it, and prints the two hostile witnesses who say it cost him nothing. It ends with the one text Seneca dictated as unmistakably his own, on the night he died, and why we don’t have it.

Every speechwriter since is Seneca, and the letter after the crime still gets written.

Read the essay at Intellicurean →

Intellicurious points to the best of what we read and make. The full essay, with its sources and colophon, lives at intellicurean.com.

Essays, History, Intellicurean.com, Literature, Philosophy

HATS AND CLOAKS

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Intellicurean Essays on Intellicurious

Prague, February 1948. A photograph of the new Communist leader on a balcony, a fur hat on his head, a comrade at his shoulder. Four years later the comrade is hanged and painted out of the picture. Milan Kundera built the most famous opening in Czech literature on what was left: the hat. A scholar has since checked the print, and the story is not quite what the photograph shows.

A painting of a dark study looking down through a leaded window at a snowy street, where walkers are seen from above as hats and cloaks only
Descartes’s window, painted for the essay: hats and cloaks in the street, and the men supplied by judgment.

Why we’re pointing you there

Everyone quotes Kundera’s line about memory and forgetting. Michael Cummins reads the page it’s on, and finds that Kundera gave the line to a character who is busy trying to erase his own past, and knew exactly what he was doing. From there the essay follows one fur hat through four sets of hands: the state’s, the novelist’s, Kundera’s own on his early work, and Nietzsche’s sister’s on her brother’s notebooks. Descartes supplies the frame, from a window in 1641: we see hats and cloaks in the street, and the men beneath them are something we judge, not something we see.

The hardest section concerns a half-page police report from 1950 that surfaced in 2008 with Kundera’s name on it. The essay lays out what the document says, what is contested, who the witnesses are related to, and decides nothing, which is the only honest thing to do with it. It makes exactly one guess about Kundera, labels it as a guess, and gives its grade. Read it for the ending, where the record does something the novel never mentions.

Read the full essay at Intellicurean →

Essays & Reviews for the Intellectually Curious

Essays, History, Lifestyle, Philosophy

I THINK, BUT AM NOT CERTAIN

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Intellicurean Essays on Intellicurious

In the spring of 45 BCE Cicero hid in a wood all day, wrote every night that nothing can be known for certain, and spent the same nights trying to buy land on which to make his dead daughter a god. What was in his mind? The essay guesses twice, and grades both guesses by his own rules.

A painting of Cicero writing by lamplight at Astura, with a translucent figure of Demosthenes, wreathed, standing unseen behind his shoulder
Cicero at Astura and the ghost of Demosthenes, painted for the essay. An invention, and captioned as one there.

Why we’re pointing you there

Most writing about Cicero’s grief for Tullia quotes the letters and moves on. Michael Cummins reads them as a working file: the philosopher checking the dates of other parents’ bereavements before he dares cite them, refusing a visit from his teenage wife, ordering columns from Chios for a shrine he never built. Then he notices who else is in the room. Demosthenes, the orator Cicero spent his life measuring himself against, had also lost an only daughter, and had been attacked in an Athenian court for grieving her too little. Cicero cited the attack, months after his own loss, in a book about grief.

What we liked most is how the two men are made to meet. Not in an invented dialogue, but in a cento: every sentence its speaker’s own, from public-domain translations named on the page, and only the arrangement the essay’s. Demosthenes never speaks of his daughter, because he never did. The essay ends fourteen centuries later in a library in Verona, with the first reader we know of who found these letters and wrote back. It is the second essay in a row with no machine in it, and the one we would hand to a sceptic.

Read the full essay at Intellicurean →

Essays & Reviews for the Intellectually Curious

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COUNTRY LIFE MAGAZINE – SEPTEMBER 23, 2026 PREVIEW

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COUNTRY LIFE MAGAZINE: The latest issue features ‘Where To Live In The West Country’….

Hide and squeak

Miniature Mouse Town has been captivating audiences for half a century, but the rodent realm has reached the end of the road, as Harry Pearson reports

Flour power

Ancient and heritage grains are enjoying a revival. Makers and growers tell Tom Howells why they are going back to the future

Property market

Penny Churchill surveys a West Country scene sparking into life with the launch onto the market of a spectacular coastal estate

Spreads from Country Life September 23, 2026

Properties of the week

West is best, says Julie Harding, as she showcases characterful and comfortable cottages for sale

To boldly go on

James Alexander-Sinclair finds out what the future holds for the innovative Eden Project as the Cornwall garden turns 25

Spreads from Country Life September 23, 2026

Chorus of approval

Henrietta Bredin hails opera’s unsung chorus lines in a look at life beyond the solo spotlight

Iain MacGregor’s favourite painting

The historian picks a work that reveals beauty in ordinary things

Country-house treasure

A tribute to ‘justice, honour and humanity’ catches John Goodall’s eye at Grey Abbey in Co Down

Spreads from Country Life September 23, 2026

Ruling the waves

Admiralty House and the Ripley Building in London represent 400 years of our naval history, as Billy Hurley Reading discovers

The legacy

Kate Green celebrates the ever-popular 19th-century Savoy operas of that peerless creative double act Gilbert & Sullivan

Get ready for rush hour

Rush is not only a haven for all manner of wildlife, but also a precious resource for artisan makers, declares Laura Parker

Deep thinking

Next stop, Aldwych… Emma Hughes goes underground to tour the forgotten platforms of London’s lost Tube stations

Spreads from Country Life September 23, 2026

Luxury

Amie Elizabeth White chooses classic check prints making an impression this autumn

Interiors

Arabella Youens warms to a fossil-stone fireplace in an Exmoor retreat and Amelia Thorpe shares some bright ideas on wall lights

Countryside mystery

The wonder of choke fungus takes John Wright’s breath away

Travel

Sophia Money-Coutts stays on the secluded Flete Estate, a favourite south Devon destination

Arts & antiques

Carla Passino visits a new British Museum exhibition exploring how Korea mastered foreign art forms and made them its own

On the hoof

Satyrs, centaurs and fauns have been strident symbols in art from Ancient Greece to the present day. Charles Harris investigates